The Greatest Propaganda Machine in History

If you haven’t yet seen Sacha Baron Cohen’s remarks to the Anti-Defamation League’s summit on antisemitism and hate in New York – which has been covered extensively in the media – here’s your chance. Well worth watching the full thing.

There’s a couple of things that stood out to me: that Facebook,
Youtube, Google et al are effectively the biggest publishers on earth,
and that with that, and the way they police their platforms, they become
the largest and most effective propaganda machines ever created. He
singles out Facebook as being the worst offender – especially
Zuckerburg’s assertion that they continue to allow politicians to serve
targeted lies because accountability trumps censure.

The algorithms these platforms depend on deliberately amplify the type of content that keeps users engaged – stories that appeal to our baser instincts and that trigger outrage and fear. It’s why YouTube recommended videos by the conspiracist Alex Jones billions of times. It’s why fake news outperforms real news, because studies show that lies spread faster than truth … As one headline put it, just think what Goebbels could have done with Facebook.

Sacha Baron Cohen

A few years ago a friend of mine, one of the most compassionate, fair
and reasonable people that I know, shared a post on Facebook created by
Britain First (a fascist pseudo political organisation) which in turn
ended up on my feed. My friend had no idea who the author was and the
post wasn’t actually offensive – it was cleverly designed to amass likes
so that their other content would show higher on peoples feeds – but I
was offended that my friend had been manipulated into sharing it. That
was the day that I permanently closed my Facebook account.

Large social networks are certainly the worst thing to happen to the
internet, and probably one of the worst things to happen to our
societies.